Jambo Jipya's attempt to alleviate social ostracizing due to HIV and AIDS

Jambo Jipya's attempt to alleviate social ostracizing due to HIV and AIDS

Jambo Jipya School is dedicated to the most vulnerable children of Mombasa whose lives have been complicated by stigma brought about by HIV and AIDS. HIV related discrimination typically has its roots upon discrimination and stigma that is already in place among the highly vulnerable and the socially maladjusted these include IDUs, MSM, CSW and particularly young and vulnerable children. regardless of how people living with HIV or AIDS become infected, they tend to become inclined to stigmatized behavior which compounds the problem. So once there is a stigmatizing environment, all sufferers from the AIDS scourge are looked at through tinted lenses and they are subjected to more suffering even from their family and friends.

Jambo Jipya School views stigma as the process of having the character of a person appear negative in the eyes of others. Stigma undoubtedly occurs when somebody or a community labels another person or group and sets them apart as unwanted. such isolation and rejection makes coping much more difficult for the persons living with HIV and AIDs. It causes added stress and leads to discrimination and all its harmful results.Stigma generally refers to a negatively perceived defining characteristic, either tangible or intangible. It is an attribute used to set the affected persons or groups apart from the normalized social order, and this separation implies devaluation (Gilmore and Somerville 1994). In regard to HIV/AIDS, the stigma may be associated with the actual infection or on behaviors believed to lead to infection.

As the global pandemic first received international recognition, populations of men who have sex with men (MSM), injection drug users (IDU), and sex workers (SW), these already socially marginalized groups began to face additional stigmatization. In such cases, "... the stigma attached to AIDS as an illness is layered upon preexisting stigma" (Herek and Glunt 1988:887). The association with an incurable disease is then used as medical justification for established patterns of exclusion of groups already deemed morally questionable (McGrath 1992). Conversely, people living with HIV/AIDS (PHA) may become implicitly associated with stigmatized behaviors, regardless of how they actually became infected (Tan and Brown 1994). These pathways of stigma are difficult to disentangle, but mutually reinforce each other (Bunting 1996).

Furthermore, stigma may be applied with varying degrees of force, depending on local moral judgments about means of acquisition (Kegeles et al. 1989). In Southeast Asia, a clear gradient of "guilt" and "innocence" has formed the discourse surrounding HIV/AIDS. Sex workers or IDUs who contract HIV are classified as most guilty, with clients of SW following, Jambo Jipya makes no classification of this kind either of the children's or their parents, it is this attitude that we wish to show within our community as it will help the cause . At the other end of the spectrum, common wisdom posits monogamous wives infected by their IDU or SW-client husbands as "innocent" and "vulnerable," while their HIV positive children, infected during pregnancy, birth, or breastfeeding become the ultimate "defenseless victims." Varying degrees of stigma are applied to these PHA groups, and often to their family members or immediate communities.

Jambo Jipya ( http://www.jambojipya.org ) is dedicated to addressing the health and educational development needs of Mombasa's most vulnerable children.

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